Bakeries and sweets in Cairo

Husband and I will be in Cairo next week. Can anyone recommend great pastry/sweets shops in downtown, Old Cairo, or Islamic Cairo? Looking only for Egyptian sweets, nothing European as I live in London. Would also be helpful to know what interesting things I should be looking for? Am happy to take a car further out for something amazing....thank you!

This is an interesting question. I lived in Cairo for a year, and really did not experience much in the way of native Egyptian sweets. Most bake shops we encountered did fairly unexciting versions of French pastries, which are considered very chic. The one exception would be "Egyptian Pancakes," or fateer. In the Khan a Khalili there is an Egyptian Pancake house, and the sweet versions -- made with honey, or bananas, or other fruit -- were one of the best native foods I had to eat there. The savory version with cheese is fantastic too.

If you're looking for Egyptian food, there isn't a single restaurant that I could recommend. When we wanted Egyptian food, we would eat at Gad, which is a chain all over Cairo and that had very good fuul, tamaya and the like. It's almost exclusively patronized by locals, so you know it's the real deal. The cheese fatiir at the Egyptian Pancake House in the Khan makes a delicious meal. The koshary place we ate in was in Maadi, I think, but there are joints all over town. If you search my posts on this board, you'll find a bunch of places that I posted about when we lived there, and I am sure very little has changed.